Fragments from "The Book of Weeping"

 This city is well-designed for weeping. It has many abandoned buildings and park benches. Many people live alone in small spaces, and can weep "behind closed doors," as it were. There are no clubs or associations devoted to weeping, per se, but weeping does arise spontaneously in certain meetings and at semi-private or public events, even at certain "celebrations of life." Certain rituals and cultural events also lend themselves to outpourings of grief. The genre of cinema called the "weepie" or the "tear-jerker" comes to mind. 

The sound of certain musical instruments mimics the sound of weeping. Guitars and violins, and certain sounds make by high-pitched brass and woodwinds. It is harder to evoke weeping through lower pitched instruments. A snare drum cannot weep, a piano can. A double bass can in its upper register, when played with a bow rather than pizzicato. People hearing imitation weeping usually do not weep themselves, but they easily recognize the intent. The experience of "being moved" is pleasurable, although this movement is almost always in the direction of grief.  

Most seem to regard weeping as a spontaneous and involuntary act, even when the weeper has taken deliberate steps to make weeping more likely, such as attending a celebration or a "weepie," or choosing to talk about "precious friends hid in death's dateless night." The gesture of almost weeping, or deliberately refraining from weeping, is quite common. It is as though grief were somehow contained. Weeping is seen to make grief somehow exterior to the person shedding tears, though the grief does not actually leave the body in any real sense. 

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The weeping of a small infant is not induced by grief, but by fear, distress, hunger, or mere discomfort. Nor do infants contain their weeping in the sense described above.   

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"If your eyes tear up when you cut onions

you can try doing it underwater."

"I don't think I can hold my breath that long."  

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Tears cleanse the eyes and also provide them with necessary moisture. Those functions do not seem related to weeping per se, where the quantity of liquid is in excess of what is needed for cleansing and lubrication. 

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The Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío did not write a treatise on weeping, but implicit in his thought are four situations: weeping involuntarily, and attempting to weep and not being able to. Those are the two he mentions. In both cases, weeping does not seem subject to the commands of the will. The other two are weeping when one wants to, and refraining from weeping when one doesn't want to weep. Here weeping (or not weeping) become intentional acts. Refraining from weeping is easy when there is not urge to weep in the first place. The issue does not come up. It is a bit more difficult when the urge is indeed present, but when one wants the grief to be "contained." (See above). Attempting to weep is a bit paradoxical. If the urge is not present, one must induce an artificial emotion first (perhaps through a kind of "method acting." If the urge is present, then it seems odd to attempt it. Yet we know that this occurs: the emotion precedent to weeping is present, but for whatever reason the weeping does not happen. Perhaps the person in this case is too accustomed to internal grief and not as practiced in its externalization. (See above.)

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A jazz musician I admired died. On hearing of this I wept, but not for very long. Once I recognized what I was doing, the urge to weep disappeared. After a few seconds, weeping for a famous person I did not know in real life seemed more like self-pity than genuine grief. If your grief for someone you know is genuine, then you will weep for a longer time. 

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The poet Claudio Rodríguez wrote a poem titled "Lágrima." He isolates a particular tear, at a particular moment in time, and analyzes how it is both inside and outside at the same time, his and not his any longer. It takes a while to dry on his cheek. The poem is sad (unsurprisingly) but it does not make the reader sad. We are interested in it, instead. If we start thinking about grief then we are no longer weeping, but doing something else with the grief. This treatise, for example, is not particularly lachrymose, even though its explicit subject is weeping. 

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Shakespeare's sonnet (cited above) is not about the spontaneous expression of grief, but about deliberately putting oneself in a mental state in which grief (for past, not present losses) is likely to occur. He has already recovered from loss and grief ("long since cancelled woes") but is choosing to explore them again. This is not a bad thing, but here it is a rhetorical device to set up the concluding couplet. To leave this state of self-imposed sorrow, all he has to do is think of the young man of the sonnets, whom he has not yet lost.